By the summer of 1999, Korn were the biggest American rock band on the planet and had no idea what to do about it. Follow the Leader had sold five million copies in twelve months, the Family Values Tour had codified an entire genre, and the band were on first-name terms with MTV. They responded by hiring Brendan O'Brien to stop them drinking, locking themselves in studios in Hollywood and Atlanta for three months, and writing an album so internal and miserable that it includes a 90-second track of Jonathan Davis muttering into a microphone called "Am I Going Crazy". When Issues landed on 16 November 1999, it sold 575,000 copies in seven days, debuted at No. 1, and shoved Dr. Dre's 2001 off the top of the Billboard 200.
The story of how this happened, what the band put themselves through to make it, and why an album that even some of its biggest fans concede is a difficult listen still defines the nu-metal era a quarter of a century later, is a story about discipline arriving very late at a party that should already have ended.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Korn |
| Album | Issues |
| Release Date | 16 November 1999 |
| Recorded | July to September 1999 |
| Studios | A&M Studios (Hollywood, California) and Southern Tracks Recording (Atlanta, Georgia) |
| Producer | Brendan O'Brien |
| Engineer | Nick DiDia |
| Mastering | Stephen Marcussen |
| Label | Immortal Records / Epic Records |
| Genre | Nu metal, alternative metal |
| Track Count | 16 (standard); 17 with bonus track "Proud" |
| Total Runtime | 53:16 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | No. 1 (575,000 first-week sales) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | No. 37 (No. 1 on UK Rock & Metal Albums) |
| Other Notable Peaks | Australia No. 1, Canada No. 2, Iceland No. 2, New Zealand No. 2, Portugal No. 2, Finland No. 4, Greece No. 6, Europe No. 8, Germany No. 9, Norway No. 10 |
| Certifications | US 3x Platinum, Canada 2x Platinum, Australia 2x Platinum, New Zealand Platinum, UK Gold, Germany Gold, Mexico Gold, Netherlands Gold, Poland Gold |
| Estimated Sales | ~13 million worldwide (3.2 million US as of 2003) |
| Singles | "Falling Away from Me" (6 Dec 1999) - "Make Me Bad" (1 Feb 2000) - "Somebody Someone" (2000) |
The Band Going In
Korn arrived at the Issues sessions in a state of barely managed exhaustion. The 1994 self-titled debut had taken nu-metal from a Bakersfield rehearsal-room curiosity to a major-label gold record. Life Is Peachy in 1996 had doubled down. Follow the Leader in 1998 had been the breakthrough: a five-million-seller in the US alone, two genuine MTV hits in "Got the Life" and "Freak on a Leash", a Grammy for the latter's video, and the Family Values Tour they had founded the year before as a vehicle for themselves and their friends in Limp Bizkit, Incubus and Orgel.
The cost was visible. Jonathan Davis had become the most public face of a band that he openly described as therapy for childhood trauma. Brian "Head" Welch and Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu were in the middle of substance-abuse arcs that would, within five years, drive Welch out of the band and into Christianity. David Silveria was carrying a series of wrist and shoulder injuries from drumming six nights a week. James "Munky" Shaffer, the closest thing the band had to a stabiliser, was on his way to fatherhood. The plan for the next record, communicated bluntly in interviews at the time, was to stop messing around and make a focused album that did not require a thirty-piece touring entourage to sound right.
Hiring Brendan O'Brien
The decision to bring in Brendan O'Brien was the single most consequential creative call of the album. The first three Korn records had been produced by Ross Robinson, the man who had effectively invented the band's sonic identity and was, by 1999, the most in-demand nu-metal producer in the world (Slipknot's debut would arrive seven months before Issues). O'Brien was a different animal. His CV in 1999 included Pearl Jam's Vs., Vitalogy and No Code, Stone Temple Pilots' Core and Purple, Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire, Soundgarden's Down on the Upside, and Bob Dylan's Knocked Out Loaded. He was a song producer, not a sound producer.
The brief was specific. The band wanted to be told no. Speaking later in the booklet to Greatest Hits Vol. 1, Korn admitted that with O'Brien in the room they were more focused than at any previous session, because he refused to let them spend the day partying. Recording took place at A&M Studios in Hollywood and at O'Brien's home base of Southern Tracks in Atlanta, with Nick DiDia (O'Brien's long-time engineering partner across the Pearl Jam and Rage albums) handling tape and Stephen Marcussen mastering.
"There was a lot less drinking this time around."
Korn, sleeve note to Greatest Hits Vol. 1, Epic Records, 2004
"Sounds like the music is a little more simplified and heavier. Kind of heavier grooves, more than the last couple. So kind of more similar to the beginning, except Jon is a much better singer now, so it's all coming together."
David Silveria, speaking to MTV's Chris Connelly during the sessions, 1999
Recording the Record
The sessions ran from July through September 1999, a comparatively short window for a band that had taken six months on Follow the Leader. O'Brien insisted on clearer arrangements than Robinson had pushed for, and the audible result is a record that is denser on the low end but cleaner in the midrange. Fieldy's slap-and-click bass tone, the single most imitated element of the entire nu-metal genre, sits further forward in the mix than on any previous Korn record. Munky and Head's seven-string Ibanez guitars are tracked tighter and more separately in the stereo field, with less of the wall-of-fuzz blur of Life Is Peachy.
Davis, who had been pulling triple shifts as singer, bagpipe player and lyricist across earlier records, expanded his role further. The album credits him with vocals, bagpipes, additional drums on six tracks ("Dead", "Trash", "4U", "It's Gonna Go Away", "Wish You Could Be Me" and "Dirty") and additional drum programming. Fieldy is credited with additional drum programming. A figure listed in the booklet only as "Jeffy Lube" appears on additional drum programming as well. The bagpipes had become, by this point, a deliberate signature: Davis had played them on the debut album's "Shoots and Ladders" and brought them back here for several short interlude tracks.
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dead | Korn | 1:12 | No | Bagpipe-and-vocal opener. Davis on additional drums. |
| 2 | Falling Away from Me | Korn | 4:29 | Yes (6 Dec 1999) | Lead single. No. 1 on MTV TRL multiple times. Released as a free MP3 against legal advice. |
| 3 | Trash | Korn | 3:27 | No | Davis on additional drums. |
| 4 | 4U | Korn | 1:42 | No | Short interlude. Davis on additional drums. |
| 5 | Beg for Me | Korn | 3:53 | No | |
| 6 | Make Me Bad | Korn | 3:55 | Yes (1 Feb 2000) | Second single. No. 9 Mainstream Rock, No. 7 Modern Rock. |
| 7 | It's Gonna Go Away | Korn | 1:29 | No | Short interlude. Davis on additional drums. |
| 8 | Wake Up | Korn | 4:07 | No | |
| 9 | Am I Going Crazy | Korn | 1:00 | No | Spoken-word interlude. |
| 10 | Hey Daddy | Korn | 3:44 | No | One of the album's most explicit lyrical pieces. |
| 11 | Somebody Someone | Korn | 3:47 | Yes (2000) | Third single. |
| 12 | No Way | Korn | 4:07 | No | |
| 13 | Let's Get This Party Started | Korn | 3:41 | No | The album's closest thing to a Family Values mosh track. |
| 14 | Wish You Could Be Me | Korn | 1:07 | No | Short interlude. Davis on additional drums. |
| 15 | Counting | Korn | 3:37 | No | |
| 16 | Dirty | Korn | 7:50 | No | Song proper ends at 3:43, with the remaining four-plus minutes a wall of white noise. Davis on additional drums. |
| 17 | Proud (bonus) | Korn | 3:18 | No | Bonus track on selected editions, taking total runtime to 56:34. |
The structure of Issues is one of its most polarising features. The standard edition runs 16 tracks across 53 minutes but five of those tracks are short interludes (under two minutes) and one is the trick-ending "Dirty" with its long tail of white noise. The actual "song" content of the album is closer to ten tracks, padded out with vignettes that Davis described at the time as deliberately uncomfortable.
"Falling Away from Me" is the centrepiece. The lead single, the song that played on MTV's Total Request Live at No. 1 for stretches of November and December 1999, and the track that ends the famous South Park episode "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery". It is also the song that Korn, against their attorneys' advice, posted to their website in October 1999 as a free MP3 download in the early Napster era, a move that looked at the time like commercial suicide and in hindsight reads as one of the first major-label endorsements of digital distribution by a band at the peak of its commercial powers.
"Make Me Bad" is the song that, more than any other on the record, demonstrates O'Brien's influence. The verse is sparse, the chorus opens up into a clear melodic line that Davis sings rather than barks, and the production leaves room for the song's melody to land. It went to No. 9 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and No. 7 on the Modern Rock chart, the highest commercial showings of any song on the album in the US after the lead single.
"Somebody Someone", the third single, was issued primarily for European markets. "Hey Daddy" is one of the most lyrically explicit tracks Davis has ever recorded and a direct sequel in subject matter to the closing track of the band's 1994 debut. "Let's Get This Party Started", placed near the end of the running order, is the closest the album comes to the Family Values mosh-pit catharsis its predecessors traded in.
The closing track, "Dirty", is the album's most divisive choice. The song itself runs to roughly three minutes and forty seconds. The remaining four minutes consist of unprocessed white noise, a decision Davis defended in interviews as both a comment on the music industry and a deliberate test of how long fans would let the CD spin in the player. On vinyl pressings the white noise occupies the full final side.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Korn | ||
| Vocals, bagpipes, additional drums, drum programming | Jonathan Davis | Additional drums on "Dead", "Trash", "4U", "It's Gonna Go Away", "Wish You Could Be Me" and "Dirty". |
| Bass, additional drum programming | Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu | The slap-bass tone is the most-imitated bass sound of the nu-metal era. |
| Guitars | James "Munky" Shaffer | Seven-string Ibanez signature guitar. |
| Guitars | Brian "Head" Welch | Left the band in 2005, returned in 2013. |
| Drums | David Silveria | Suffered a wrist injury mid-tour in March 2000, leading to Mike Bordin stepping in. |
| Additional musicians | ||
| Additional drum programming | Jeffy Lube | Credited only by that pseudonym in the album booklet. |
| Production | ||
| Producer, mixing | Brendan O'Brien | First Korn record not produced by Ross Robinson. O'Brien also produced Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Rage Against the Machine in the 1990s. |
| Recording engineer | Nick DiDia | Long-time O'Brien collaborator across his Pearl Jam and Rage records. |
| Additional engineering, editing | Tobias Miller | |
| Engineering | Ryan Williams | |
| Assisting | Bryan Cook, Karl Egsieker | |
| Digital editing | Andrew Garver | |
| Mastering | Stephen Marcussen | |
| Executive producers | Jeff Kwatinetz, The Firm | The band's management company. |
| Touring substitute | ||
| Drums (touring, March-August 2000) | Mike Bordin | Faith No More drummer. Filled in after Silveria's wrist injury. Played nearly 100 shows including Summer Sanitarium 2000. |
The MTV Cover Contest
The album's visual identity was outsourced to the audience. Korn ran an MTV-administered contest inviting fans to design the album cover, with the winning entry to appear on the standard worldwide release and runner-up designs to appear on alternate pressings. The winning artwork, a translucent broken-doll figure in muted blues and greys, was created by Alfredo Carlos and submitted, famously, in a pizza box.
Three runner-up designs were released on alternate pressings of the album and a fifth, more cartoonish half-caricature of the band, appeared on a limited tour edition. The result is that Issues exists in five different physical sleeves, a collector's headache and one of the most distinctive packaging stories of the major-label CD era. Jason Draper's A Brief History of Album Covers (Flame Tree Publishing, 2008) devotes two pages to the project.
Release and Commercial Performance
The album landed on 16 November 1999 and immediately put Korn into a fight at the top of the Billboard 200 with two of the biggest commercial releases of the year. Dr. Dre's 2001 was out on the same release schedule and sold 516,000 copies in its first week. Celine Dion's All the Way... A Decade of Song was also in the chart picture. Issues outsold both with 575,000 copies in seven days, blocking 2001 from the top spot. By 22 December 1999, just over a month after release, the RIAA had certified the album triple platinum. By 2003, Nielsen SoundScan put US sales at over 3.2 million; total worldwide sales by 2023 were estimated at around 13 million.
The international picture was unusually wide for an American nu-metal record. The album hit No. 1 in Australia, No. 1 on the UK Rock & Metal chart, No. 2 in Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Portugal, No. 4 in Finland, No. 6 in Greece, No. 8 on the European Top 100, No. 9 in Germany, No. 10 in Norway, and charted across the Benelux, Italy, France, Japan and Hungary. Australia certified it double platinum, Canada double platinum, New Zealand platinum, the UK, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands and Poland gold.
Critical Reception
Critics split sharply along generational lines. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the album four-and-a-half stars and read it as Korn's most coherent statement to that point, praising the focus and the way O'Brien's production let melody co-exist with weight. Colin Larkin's Encyclopedia of Popular Music awarded four stars. Rolling Stone gave it three. The Encyclopedia, AllMusic and several mainstream outlets praised the focus and the O'Brien production. The other end of the press was harsher: Entertainment Weekly gave it a C, NME 6 out of 10, Spin 5 out of 10, PopMatters 3 out of 10, Robert Christgau dismissed it as a "dud" in The Village Voice, and The Rolling Stone Album Guide later downgraded it to two-and-a-half stars on retrospective review.
The split mattered less than the sales. With "Falling Away from Me" running on TRL and the South Park cameo airing in October, Korn had a level of mainstream cultural penetration in late 1999 that no amount of negative critical opinion could dent. Retrospectively, the record has been re-evaluated more kindly. Metal Hammer named it one of the top 20 metal albums of 1999 in a 2021 retrospective; Loudwire ranked it fifteenth on their 50 greatest nu-metal albums list in 2025.
"It was a lot of fun to jam with him, he's punk rock at heart and just a great drummer. So for a while there you had Korn with this Faith No More groove, it was crazy."
James "Munky" Shaffer on touring drummer Mike Bordin filling in for the injured David Silveria, 2015
The Apollo, the MP3 and the Charity Chain Letter
Three pieces of marketing around the album have outlived most of the music industry's late-1990s strategies. First: the band performed Issues in full, in running order, at Harlem's Apollo Theater on 15 November 1999, the night before the album dropped. The Apollo was, by tradition, a soul and R&B venue. Korn became one of the first major rock acts ever to play it, a piece of pre-release theatre that earned them coverage in the New York papers and on MTV News.
Second: the free MP3 of "Falling Away from Me" posted to the band's official website in October 1999, against the explicit advice of the label's legal team. The statement on the site at the time framed it as a gift to fans. Industry-wide, it was a year ahead of Metallica's lawsuit against Napster, and it positioned Korn on the opposite side of the same fight.
Third: an online chain letter, run in parallel with the MP3 release, asked fans to email a Korn-supplied letter to ten friends and sign an "I Downloaded the Korn Single for Free" guestbook. For each signature, the band donated 25 cents to Childhelp USA and Children of the Night. The campaign raised over $250,000 for the two child-welfare charities and remains one of the largest fan-driven music-industry charity drives of the pre-social-media era.
Touring and Live
The Sick and Twisted Tour ran throughout 2000 as the album's primary touring vehicle. Direct support across various legs included Staind, P.O.D. and Mindless Self Indulgence, all then in the early phases of their own careers. Korn used the tour as a deliberate platform for newer acts, in the same way that the Family Values Tour had been used in 1998 and 1999. The Summer Sanitarium Tour, headlined by Metallica with Korn as second on the bill alongside Kid Rock, Powerman 5000 and System of a Down, ran across North American stadiums between June and August 2000 and was one of the highest-grossing rock tours of that year. The Issues touring cycle effectively ran from late 1999 through the end of 2000, by which point the band had played more than 200 shows in support of the record.
In March 2000, David Silveria suffered a serious wrist injury that effectively ended his ability to play the tour. Faith No More had broken up in April 1998, and their drummer Mike Bordin, who had since been working with Ozzy Osbourne, was available. Bordin stepped in for what turned into nearly 100 shows across a five-month period, including dates on the summer 2000 Summer Sanitarium Tour. Munky later said the change shifted the band's whole rhythmic feel, giving them what he called "this Faith No More groove" for the rest of the touring cycle. MTV's Diary series filmed an episode with the band in February 2000, airing the following month, which captured the period including cameo appearances from Head Welch's then-wife Rebekah Landis and their infant daughter Jennea.
Setlists across the tour leaned heavily on the new album, with "Falling Away from Me", "Make Me Bad", "Beg for Me", "Trash", "Somebody Someone" and "Let's Get This Party Started" all in heavy rotation, interleaved with the established Follow the Leader and self-titled material. The interlude tracks were almost universally skipped live, a decision the band attributed to wanting to keep the energy of arena shows up. "Dirty" was performed at a handful of dates in truncated form, the white-noise outro left for the record.
In TV and Film
The single most consequential sync placement of the album was the South Park episode "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery", which aired on Comedy Central on 27 October 1999, two and a half weeks before the album's release. The episode parodied Scooby-Doo, depicted the band as cartoon mystery-solvers travelling with a chicken-creature named Nibblet, and closed with a full play of "Falling Away from Me". It put the lead single in front of a non-overlapping audience three weeks ahead of the album's commercial release and is widely credited as a major driver of the song's MTV trajectory.
The album's songs subsequently appeared in a number of late-1990s and early-2000s film and TV soundtracks, although none with the same commercial impact as the South Park placement. The 2001 All Mixed Up EP, which Epic released as a bonus disc with later pressings of Issues, gathered alternate mixes and remixes including a Dub Pistols mix of "Good God" and a Josh Abraham mix of "Got the Life". The EP also surfaced a Crystal Method remix of "Falling Away from Me" that had previously circulated only on radio promos, and gave the album a second commercial life in dance-rock crossover sections of US record stores throughout 2001.
The South Park association became an unusually enduring piece of cross-media branding for a single sync placement. The episode rotated heavily in syndication on Comedy Central through the early 2000s and remains a fan reference point today, with the band themselves periodically acknowledging it on stage by quoting the cartoon's catchphrases into the microphone between songs. Few rock album lead singles get a half-hour animated comedy preview, fewer still get one written and aired three weeks before release. By the time the album hit shops, a significant subset of American teenagers had already heard "Falling Away from Me" twice on television.
Legacy and Influence
Issues sits at an awkward but pivotal point in the Korn catalogue. It is the last record before the band entered the long mid-2000s wilderness of Untouchables (2002), Take a Look in the Mirror (2003) and the original Head Welch departure. It is also the first Korn record to demonstrate that the band could function with a producer other than Ross Robinson, a transition that became permanent: Robinson never returned to the producer's chair on a studio album. O'Brien himself did not return either, but the principle (a song-focused outside producer rather than a sonic-sculpting Robinson disciple) was established.
For nu-metal as a genre, Issues is the record that proves the form could chart at the absolute top of the album market without softening its edges or chasing radio. It came out the same year as Slipknot's debut and Limp Bizkit's Significant Other, and it outsold both in its opening week. It demonstrated that the audience built by Follow the Leader and the first two Family Values tours was not transient: it was durable, it had buying power, and it would show up in record stores in the millions on day one. Every subsequent nu-metal No. 1 (Linkin Park's Meteora, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish, Slipknot's Vol. 3) followed in the lane Issues had widened.
The record's reputation has rehabilitated steadily over the last decade. Retrospective lists from Metal Hammer, Loudwire and Kerrang! have moved it up the canonical nu-metal rankings. The MTV cover contest is now studied as an early case of brand-fan co-creation. And the chain-email charity drive is increasingly cited as one of the first genuinely participatory pre-release campaigns in the history of major-label music marketing.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The pizza-box submission | Alfredo Carlos's winning cover design was famously submitted to MTV in a pizza box, beating over 1,000 other fan entries. |
| Five different covers | The album exists in five different sleeves: the standard Carlos design, three runner-up MTV designs on alternate pressings, and a fifth half-caricature design on the limited tour edition. |
| The Dre block | Issues sold 575,000 in its first week, blocking Dr. Dre's 2001 (516,000) from No. 1 on the Billboard 200. |
| $250,000 raised for charity | The "I Downloaded the Korn Single for Free" chain-email campaign raised over $250,000 for Childhelp USA and Children of the Night. |
| Apollo Theater first | Korn played Issues front to back at Harlem's Apollo Theater on 15 November 1999, becoming one of the first major rock acts to perform at the traditionally soul and R&B venue. |
| The Faith No More cover | Mike Bordin of Faith No More filled in for the injured David Silveria for nearly 100 shows in 2000, including the Summer Sanitarium Tour. |
| The South Park episode | "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery" aired three weeks before the album, used "Falling Away from Me" as its closing track and parodied Scooby-Doo. |
| The free MP3 | The band posted "Falling Away from Me" as a free MP3 on their website in October 1999 against legal advice, a year before Metallica sued Napster. |
| The white-noise ending | Closer "Dirty" ends as a song at 3:43 and runs another four minutes as unprocessed white noise. On vinyl it occupies the entire final side. |
| Davis on drums | Jonathan Davis is credited with additional drums on six of the album's 16 tracks, in addition to vocals and bagpipes. |
| The Brendan O'Brien switch | This was the first Korn album not produced by Ross Robinson. Robinson never returned to produce a Korn studio record. |
| 13 million sold | Estimated worldwide sales reached approximately 13 million copies by 2023, with 3.2 million in the US by 2003. |
Podcast
The Riffology podcast covers Issues as a full-episode deep dive in RIFF025. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts, and dig into the rest of the Korn catalogue from the 1994 self-titled debut through to the band's most recent work.
